Mods And Rockers Quotes

Rag Tags, you see, are absolutely free to do as they please, which for the most part is to imitate each other. And you only have to take a closer look at most youth culture groups to verify that. Mods and rockers, skinheads and greasers, teddy boys, suadeheads, chavs, emos, goths etc. all fear that by being different they’ll be left out in the cold. That’s why they’re Rag Tags

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

He was tall and thin, with a shock of grey hair and eyebrows that could stop a supernova in its tracks. His wardrobe ranged from ageing punk rocker to sharp-suited mod, but today veered towards the latter: a crisp white shirt buttoned to the neck beneath a velvet Crombie jacket.

That short-haired young chap stepping out in all his aquamarine magnificence was tagging along behind a very long line of others who’d walked the same road before him: teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, hippies, soul boys and punks - and those are just the cultural tribes from my lifetime. It’s a tradition stretching back right through the centuries, to the time when London was still in the first flush of youth.

Margate’s never been easy, always hard. ‘If you want a dirty weekend, go to Margate,’ I always say. You can be as dirty as you like. Van Gogh and Turner, Ronnie Biggs and the Krays all went there. Romans, Vikings, Hell’s Angels, teds, mods, rockers and punks, they all fought there.